Tomoaki ISHIDA

The TOM Method

Self-Stress Management Conducted with The Best One Who Understands, One's Own Self

Tomoaki ISHIDA

Department of Biomedical Sciences

College of Life Sciences

Ritsumeikan University

Abstract

Animal-Assisted Therapy,
AAT, is the most popular therapy effective against mood disorders such as
depression. Animals, such as dogs, horses, and dolphins, assist in improving
patients’ mood. Although AAT has been used successfully around the world,
animals often cause problems among neighbors because of their barks, smells and
so on. For this reason, it is necessary to originate the alternative stress
management for AAT. In this project, I named my stress management the TOMmethod
from my first name and developed theTOM method
to the alternative method as AAT. Purposes of this project are to generalize
the TOMMethod to be a comfortable
method and to build the procedure of generalization of the TOM method.
TheTOMmethod is one kind of Cognitive
Behavioral Therapy (CBT), one of the psychotherapies. CBT represses the
reaction against the fear by working on the brain. Besides that, there is no
fear that the TOMmethod causes problems
among neighbors because CBT doesn’t need the assist of animals. As a result,
the TOMmethod is more comfortable
to use than AAT. The key point of the TOMmethod
is that the person divides one’s own self into two roles. This procedure equals
that the person creates two imaginary friends. From this standpoint, the
generalization of the TOMmethod is following. First, people become accustomed to
assigning a role by using a stuffed toy. After that, they train it by assigning
a role to everything around them. Finally, they practice using the TOMmethod.
The TOM method represses the
reaction to the fear and there is no fear that the TOM method causes
problems among neighbors. The procedure of generalization is stuffed toy,
everything around us and no item, in other words, to accustom, to train and to
practice. In conclusion, theTOMmethod can be used as an
alternative self-stress management to AAT.

Video Clip

The outline of my project is shown in this video clip. Please watch it.